Getting Started with NVIDIA SHIELD

By David Coombes, posted Aug 05 2013 at 11:22AM

We hope you're as excited about NVIDIA® SHIELD™ as we are! While we will be posting deeper technical information about SHIELD soon, we wanted to give you some immediate guidance on what you can do to prepare your games today for the ultimate mobile experience. Here are some tips to make sure your games work seamlessly with SHIELD:

Android Apps

Support Landscape Mode Gaming

SHIELD is a landscape format device. It can also be attached to a TV through HDMI. Therefore games for SHIELD should be created for landscape mode.

Support the Controller

Games should take advantage of the console grade controls built into SHIELD. Tilt and touch are also available even when the device is connected to an external display though HDMI. A How To Guide is available for adding support for game controllers to Android apps.

PC Streaming

One of Shield's exciting new features is the ability to stream games from your PC. This means that certain considerations must be given to ensure that your game is designed for the best experience possible. We will be publishing a tuning guide for PC games on NVIDIA® SHIELD™ in the near future.

More developer information will be made available soon.

Support the Controller

PC games are generally built for mouse and keyboard. SHIELD has neither so build your UI around the controller.

Support the Screen Size

Text that is readable on a computer monitor can become hard to read on a 5" screen. Consider rescaling your UI for the smaller screen.

Next Steps

For all the latest tools, tips and information about developing for SHIELD, be sure to check out the Develop4SHIELD and the Tegra Resources pages.

If you have technical questions, feel free to post it in the Android Development section on our DevTalk forums. We will do our best to answer them there.